Scratch Pad 21 February 1997

Scratch Pad 21 February 1997 Graphic by Ditmar Scratch Pad 21 Based on the non-Mailing Comments section of The Great Cosmic Donut of Life No. 10, a magazine written and published by Bruce Gillespie, 59 Keele Street, Victoria 3066, Australia (phone (03) 9419-4797; email: [email protected]) for the February 1997 mailing of Acnestis. Cover: Ditmar (Dick Jenssen). Contents 1 IAIN M. BANKS: 6 BOOKS READ SINCE NOVEMBER 1996 by Bruce THE ‘CULTURE’ SCIENCE-FICTION NOVELS Gillespie AND THE ECONOMICS AND POLITICS OF SCAR- 7 PRECIOUS TIME by Marc Ortlieb CITY AND ABUNDANCE by Race Mathews 9 FAVOURITE BOOKS 1996 by Bruce Gillespie 6 MY CAREER GOES BUNG by Bruce Gillespie RACE MATHEWS is a Senior Research Fellow in the Graduate School of Government at Monash University. He has served previously as a Victorian government minister, a federal MP and a municipal councillor. His Australia’s First Fabians: Middle-Class Radicals, Labour Activists and the Early Labour Movement was published by Cambridge University Press in 1993, and he is currently writing about the Distributist and Co-operative Movements. Iain M. Banks: The ‘Culture’ science-fiction novels and the economics and politics of scarcity and abundance by Race Mathews Paper delivered for the Nova Mob by Race Mathews, 6 of peace will be those areas — roughly corresponding to the November 1996. This was delivered on the same night as current developed world — where conditions of relative my own ‘A Taste for Mayhem: Iain Banks’s Non-SF Novels’. abundance take the sting out of social frictions and enable Both are preprints from SF Commentary 76. democratic institutions and relative social harmony to be maintained. The zones of turmoil are the rest of the world In 1993, the American scholars Max Singer and Aaron — roughly corresponding to today’s lesser-developed coun- Wildavsky made a much-discussed contribution to futur- tries — where life continues to be dominated by the struggle ology with their book The Real World Order: Zones of Peace, for scarce resources among individuals, interest groups, Zones of Turmoil.1 Their theme is the economics and politics social classes and nations. Singer and Wildavsky argue that of scarcity. The book argues that it will be roughly another the challenge for policy-makers is how to contain and quar- hundred years before science and technology reach a point antine the tensions in the zones of turmoil so that the zones where the world’s consumption requirements can be satis- of peace can as much as possible get on with developing the fied. Throughout the intervening period, the globe will be scientific and technological know-how which will ultimately divided into zones of peace and zones of turmoil. The zones — a century from now — enable us to come together as a unified and harmonious planet-wide social order. Objection could be taken to this view on the grounds 1 Singer, M. and Wildavsky, A., The Real World Order: Zones of that it is — among other things — unoriginal, superficial, Peace, Zones of Turmoil, Chatham, NJ: Chatham House, 1993. 2 immoral and at variance with such observable facts as that They could make anything the Culture was capable of the increasing aggregate wealth of the prospective zones of making, contained all the knowledge the Culture had ever peace is not so far resulting in any appreciable diminution accumulated, carried or could construct specialised equip- in the struggle for resources within them, or enhancing ment of every imaginable type for every conceivable even- either democratic institutions or social harmony or prevent- tuality, and continually manufactured smaller ships. Their ing the emergence of an under-class whose deprivation in complements were measured in millions at least. They many cases is as great as could be found, for the most part, crewed their offspring ships out of the gradual increase in in any zone of turmoil. Science fiction readers may well their own population. Self-contained, self-sufficient, pro- ductive and, in peacetime at least, continually exchanging suspect that social and political pathologies will result in a information, they were the Culture’s ambassadors, its most global future that more closely resembles the world of visible citizens and its technological and intellectual big Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner than John W. Campbell Jr’s For- guns. There was no need to travel from the galactic back- getfulness. woods to some distant Culture home-planet to be amazed What is also apparent from the science-fiction perspec- and impressed by the stunning scale and awesome power of tive is that we have been here before. Singer and Wildavsky the Culture: a GSV would bring it right up to your front are one more instance of science playing catch-up with door. science fiction. That problems arise where societies charac- The ships are operated — and society more generally is terised by abundance co-exist with those characterised by largely administered — by Artificial Intelligences known as scarcity has been a science-fiction trope for as long virtually Minds.2 as the genre has existed. Moreover, it is in science fiction that the consequent moral and political complexities of the John Clute’s entry on Banks in The Encyclopedia of Science juxtaposition have the more successfully been identified Fiction rightly notes that: ‘There are no Empires in the and explored. For example, to what extent is quarantine or Culture, no tentacled Corporations, no Enclave whose hid- containment either a moral or a practical option? Is there den knowledge gives its inhabitants a vital edge in their an obligation on the part of societies characterised by attempts to maintain independence against the military abundance to assist those which are less well off, and, if so, hardware of the far-off Czar at the apex of the pyramid of to what extent and by what means? Where does alleviating power.’3 Abundance born of science and technology has scarcity leave off and intrusion by the donors on the cultural long since made redundant the need for the population to and social integrity of the recipients take over? Can inter- compete economically with one another. Inasmuch as the vention in the interests of averting loss of life and suffering Culture has a political philosophy, it loosely combines the be reconciled with respect for the independence of the better elements of anarchism, socialism and communitari- society where they are being experienced and the need for anism, in a manner broadly reminiscent of William Morris it to make mistakes in order to learn from them, and, if so, and News from Nowhere. ‘The Culture’, says Banks, ‘is my idea what are the limits of intervention? of Utopia’: These and other related questions have nowhere been more effectively posed in science-fiction terms than in the Or at least as close as you can get to Utopia with what we work of Iain M. Banks. Banks’s intellectual stock in trade in regard as recognisably human stock. I’d love to live there, key respects resembles that of Singer and Wildavsky, albeit and that’s been the guiding principle behind the whole restated against a galactic backdrop. The major preoccupa- thing. Not that it always comes out that way in the books, tion of his science fiction is with whether — and, if so, on because I’m trying hard not to make it look wonderful and 4 what terms — societies characterised respectively by abun- goody-goody and all the rest of it. dance and scarcity can co-exist. Unlike Singer and Wildavsky, Banks also has interesting things to say about the The Culture’s preferred relationship with other species advantages and disadvantages that living in an abundance and societies is one of peaceful co-existence, tempered by economy and a utopian social order might be found to the need to fend off such military challenges as may occa- have. He is in every respect a more readable, engaging and sionally arise, and the urge to intervene — some within the thought-provoking writer than Singer and Wildavsky. Culture might call it meddle — where the predicament of Cynics might go so far as to say that his extrapolations are local populations is felt to be intolerable. Intervention is the no less likely than those of Singer and Wildavsky to come business of a Special Circumstances agency, which is fre- true. quently violent and unscrupulous in meeting its objectives. The activities of the Special Circumstances agency are what The Culture much of Banks’s writing is about. The pre-eminent social order of Banks’s universe is known simply as the Culture. Its inhabitants are human, albeit of The State of the Art non-terrestrial origin and in key respects genetically en- The core Banks issues are posed in simplest and starkest hanced. Their homes are predominantly the General Sys- terms in the novella The State of the Art, from Banks’s collec- tems Vehicles — planet-size spaceships — in which they tion of short fiction of the same name. The year is 1977. A move between the stars: General Contact Unit from the Culture — a spaceship of massive size and awesome capacities, but in turn only a General Systems Vehicles were like encapsulated worlds. minor component of the infinitely larger General Systems They were more than just very big spaceships; they were Vehicle which Banks describes casually as currently ‘tramp- habitats, universities, factories, museums, dockyards, lib- ing a thousand years core-ward’ — stations itself in the raries, even mobile exhibition centres. They represented the Culture — they were the Culture. Almost anything that could be done anywhere in the Culture could be on a GSV. 3 Clute, J., ‘Iain M.

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